Santa Clara County Health officials now reveal two people with the coronavirus died in California weeks before the first reported death from the disease was announced.
According to CNN, Santa Clara County officials shared on Tuesday that the people died at home in early February, weeks before the first death reported in Kirkland, Washington, on February 29.
Officials said the Medical Examiner received confirmation yesterday that tissue samples sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested positive for the virus.
These two deaths now stand as the country’s earliest cases attributed to the novel coronavirus. This development will now appear to shift the understanding of how early the virus was spreading around in the U.S.
Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s chief medical officer, told The NY Times that these two cases in California had no known previous travel histories to China or anywhere else that would have exposed them to the virus, and are presumed to have caught the virus through community spread.⠀
Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told CNN’s New Day on Wednesday that these findings are a very significant thing.
“Somebody who died on February 6, they probably contracted that virus early to mid-January. It takes at least two to three weeks from the time you contract the virus, and you die from it.”
Dr. Jha also noted the importance of the fact that these two cases had not contracted the virus from travel.
“That means there was community spread happening in California as early as mid-January, if not earlier than that,” Jha said, “We really need to now go back, look at a lot more cases from January — even December — and try to sort out when did we first really encounter this virus in the United States.”
